Facebook Group Hacks with Pat Flynn

Our team has just finished watching this video of Pat Flynn’s from earlier this year. It’s all about using Facebook groups, and he shares 27 different tips and hacks for Facebook marketing within your groups.

We think it will give you a lot of great ideas for your own Facebook group. It even prompted us to reflect on how we use Facebook groups at ProBlogger.

Pat’s Facebook business group tips are for how to:

Grow your group

Increase engagement

Make money from it

Check out all of his 27 tips and hacks here:

For the first six tips (‘Growing your group’), I’ve outlined what it looks like for us at ProBlogger.

This is such a simple thing to do. But only a few of our team members use signatures, and none of us have a link to the group in it. Laney is one team member who doesn’t use them, and this has prompted her to set hers up.

We hadn’t done this before now, and it took all of 30 seconds to link our new 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Course group to our main group with a note of how to sign up for the course. We may get an influx of people requesting to join, but you need a password to be accepted into the group (which you get when you sign up for the course).

We use hashtags to direct discussion so it’s constructive and positive as possible for members, and to make threads easier to find

We post our group guidelines on our About Page, and expect members to read and abide by them so everyone can come away feeling a step closer to building a successful blog

ProBlogger Darren Rowse usually does a Facebook Live video tutorial in the group once a week (Tuesday 10:30am AEST, Wednesday 5:30pm PT, Wednesday 6:30pm MT)

Groups for Support and Feedback

We used a Facebook group to launch our Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog course in January this year for more than 1,000 enrolled students to provide us with feedback on the course.

We also have a Facebook group for a Mastermind group for people to connect before and after a live event to share ideas and expertise.

Social Learning Groups

Right now we’re most excited by our 31 Days to Build a Better Blog course Facebook group, which uses new ‘Social Learning Group’ functionality.

Facebook’s Social Learning Group type has only been released in the past couple of months. We decided to try it after one of our ProBlogger Community members Melanie Surplice of Surplice of Spirit originally mentioned it in a group discussion. (How handy are groups?!)

Apparently Facebook first trialed a feature called ‘units” last year without announcing or publicizing it. Units are incorporated into this social learning group, which is just like a regular group except:

Admins can organize posts into units, and change the order they appear in

Group members can click ‘I’m done’ to let the admin know they’ve interacted with the unit

Admins can view group insights and see details on unit and post completion.

a call to action for students to share their results or comment on the learning outcome of that day

That way, students can easily find the discussion for the particular day or topic of the course they’re up to and interact with their fellow students and the ProBlogger team.

Although our courseware has forum functionality, we’ve switched it off in favor of using Facebook. Our students prefer the more open, social nature of interaction on Facebook. They also get Facebook notifications, which provide another touchpoint to check back into the course and keep progressing.

Do you have a Facebook group for your blog? Which tips do you think you can use straight away?